Peter Furtado

Peter Furtado joins the celebrations of the Victorian Society as it commemorates half a century of defending the country’s nineteenth-century heritage.

 Peter Furtado reflects on this issue and his time as Editor of History Today.

 Tibet, the ‘Forbidden Land’ ever since 1793 when it banned foreigners from entering, has long been an object of fascination, perhaps to Britons especially, since Colonel Francis Younghusband forced his way to Lhasa in 1904.

One of the great – but relatively ignored – atrocities of the twentieth century was the rape of Nanjing (formerly Nanking) by the Japanese Imperial Army in early December 1937, during which some 200,000 Chinese were massacred and perhaps another 20,000 raped.

Recently the prime minister has urged soldiers to wear their uniform proudly even when off-duty, and there certainly seems to be an attempt to foster civic pride in the military, with regiments returning from Iraq or Afghanistan parading through the streets, to be greeted by flag-waving shoppers.

 Happenings were the in-thing in the 1960s, and the late 1960s – 1968 specifically – are the in-thing at the moment: so much so that the BBC is devoting a daily programme to the sounds of the year, a degree of attention that it has not accorded even to equally crowded turning-points such as 1945 or 1989.

 How should a society acknowledge the history of minority communities within its borders, particularly minorities that have suffered at the hands of the majority?